The first two days of NaNoWrimo have gone better than I expected in terms of word count – I have managed to rack up over 7 thousand words, however I am mired in character building and character background, trying to get the voice of each character before I move on with the action. There is some movement forward in the story, albeit very slowly. I am trying to get as much written as possible so that when I come to edit it all at some point I have something sizable to work with.
Rather predictably, the Nano site is exceedingly slow at in the evening from about tea-time to bed time. In fact so slow that I just keep on getting timed out pages so I am updating my word count in the mornings. It’s not going to give a very accurate picture of my actual daily word count because half of one day will be carried over to the next day, but it averages out in the end. It’s just numbers, the main thing is that I am getting stuff down, printing it out and not reading through it too much. Difficult when you’ve written stuff by hand though.
Even though it’s just the first draft, I still find myself wanting to make it the best that I can as I go along, which is good in a way but might end up slowing me down. I have to constantly remind myself that it doesn’t matter if it’s crap because you can shape the crap into better crap later on.
But I can’t just spend every spare minute typing. I need thinking time as well for the novel to develop, so even though it might seem that the writing is standing still, its moving along all the time. You need to give yourself space to have eureka moments for the plot, which makes it more of an exciting journey.
And I’ve just got Orhan Pamuk’s ‘Snow’ out of the library to read during the month. I did want to get My Name is Red, but typically they didn’t have it.